Fox Mulder's work on the X-files (1990-1994)
FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder found the X-files in late 1990. (TXF: "Travelers") He was assigned to the cases that same year. (TXF: "Kill Switch") Mulder was briefly partnered with Agent Diana Fowley in 1991. (TXF: "The End") In a period between 1992 and mid-1994, he continued to investigate the X-files with Special Agent Dana Scully. (''The X-Files'' Season 1) History 1990 Mulder came across the X-files when his previous success at applying behavioral models to criminal cases allowed him a certain freedom to pursue his own interests. Initially, the X-files seemed to him like "a garbage dump for UFO sightings, alien abduction reports, the kind of stuff that most people laugh at as being ridiculous". Mulder, however, was fascinated by the files and read hundreds of them, including all the cases he was allowed access to. He read everything he could about paranormal phenomena and the occult. (TXF: "Pilot") Mulder found many X-files that recorded accounts of alien abductees who had suffered intense radiation burns. (TXF: "Fallen Angel") He also discovered file X-649176 and the first X-file, initiated by J. Edgar Hoover in 1946. Both files contained reports of men who had been able to physically transform into wild animals. (TXF: "Shapes") Another file Mulder saw dated back to 1952 and concerned something that had killed livestock and terrorized people living in Point Pleasant, West Virginia for over a year. After witnesses had described seeing primitive looking men with red piercing eyes, the culprits had become known as "moth men". (TXF: "Detour") Although the X-files constituted a project outside the Bureau mainstream, Mulder pursued the files because he was continually haunted by having witnessed his sister, Samantha, being abducted by aliens. (TXF: "Pilot", "The Truth") He was assigned to the cases in 1990. (TXF: "Kill Switch") .]] One of the first X-files Mulder investigated himself involved a killer named Edward Skur. In November 1990, Mulder met Arthur Dales, a former Special Agent with the FBI who, in 1952, had opened an X-file on Skur labeled X-525652. Dales revealed the involvement of Mulder's father in experiments that had been conducted involving xenotransplantation. Dales also warned Mulder that, if he kept "digging through the X-files", he would be ruined by his superiors, like Dales had been. (TXF: "Travelers") 1991 After joining the FBI in 1991, Diana Fowley - Mulder's girlfriend and an FBI agent with a background in para-science - helped him investigate a few of the X-files. While working on the cases, Mulder and Fowley spent some time in psychiatric hospitals where they suspected that some patients serving criminal sentences had been misdiagnosed. Additionally, a few patients showed impressively accurate clairvoyant and telepathic abilities. Mulder learned that Fowley had run brain scans and psych evaluations. After the Berlin Wall was dismantled, Fowley accepted a counter-terrorism legate assignment in Berlin, Europe, simultaneously ending her tenure on the X-files and her relationship with Mulder. (TXF: "The End") :It is unclear how many and which psychiatric patients Mulder and Fowley felt had been misdiagnosed, whether those patients also showed telepathic abilities and, if so, how many. It is uncertain whether Mulder witnessed the patients exhibit telepathic abilities, only that Diana Fowley did so. :It is also unclear if Mulder, having graduated from the FBI Academy before Diana Fowley, showed her how to run brain scans and psych evaluations or if she learned how to conduct those procedures herself. Logically, she may have either learned how to perform such tasks prior to investigating the relevant case, which might or might not have involved the psychiatric patients, or during the case. :Historically, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall ended in November 1991 but this date has not been established in ''The X-Files lore, only that "the Wall came down".'' 1992 .]] By March 1992, Mulder's office was in the basement of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington, D.C., where the X-files were also stored. (TXF: "Pilot") The office had only dusty skylight windows and Mulder had decorated the walls with artifacts related to the paranormal, including a UFO poster proclaiming "I Want to Believe" that he obtained from a head shop on M Street shortly before March 6. (TXF: "Pilot", "Chinga") Dana Scully.]] Division Chief Scott Blevins, Mulder's superior, believed he had developed a consuming devotion to the X-files. (TXF: "Pilot") As a result, Blevins assigned Special Agent Dana Scully, a medical doctor with a background in hard science, to assist Mulder on the X-files and provide an analytical perspective on the cases, including field reports and observations on the validity of their work. (TXF: (TXF: "Pilot", "Gethsemane") When Mulder first met Scully, he told her that his memories of the abduction of his sister had marked him so deeply that nothing else mattered. (TXF: "Pilot", "The Red and the Black") On their first assignment together, Mulder and his new FBI partner investigated several mysterious deaths of high school students in Oregon. Mulder was thrilled when he and Scully apparently experienced a sudden loss of nine minutes while working on the case, as time loss was a phenomenon commonly reported by alien abductees. He later came to the unlikely conclusion that Billy Miles, a paralyzed boy who had been in a "waking coma" since 1987, was responsible for the deaths. Mulder also remarked that the experience of seeing an extremely bright light illuminate and eventually engulf an area of Collum National Forest while Billy Miles stood under it, holding a teenager up in his arms, was "incredible". (TXF:"Pilot") Around this time, Mulder first met a forensic anthropathologist named Arlinksy. The two would keep in contact until 1997. (TXF: "Gethsemane") 1993 In early 1993, Mulder noted the death of a 32-year-old male UMW labor organizer who had died after having sex. The body showed symptoms of massive coronary arrest and the presence of huge amounts of pheromones, a chemical secreted by animals as a sexual attractant, discovered to be a hundred times stronger than found anywhere in nature. The victim had been found dead in the woods outside Steveston, Massachusetts, home to a sect of religious isolationists called the Kindred. (TXF: "Gender Bender") :In "Gender Bender", Mulder mentions that he noted this incident "about a year ago" and the episode takes place in early 1994. Mulder may have learned about the Kindred's existence at this time, as he tells Scully about them in the episode, but there is insufficient evidence to prove whether he did, or if he learned about their existence at a later date. in 1993.]] Later the same year, Scully helped FBI Agent Tom Colton and the Baltimore Police Department investigate a series of unexplained murders in which each victim's liver had been ripped from their body. Colton wanted Scully to help him alone, as he disapproved of Mulder's belief that the paranormal could solve unexplained cases, but Mulder nevertheless conducted his own investigation of the case. He discovered that Eugene Victor Tooms, an employee of the Baltimore Municipal Animal Control, was actually a limb-stretching serial killer who had murdered his first victim in 1903. Mulder believed that Tooms was a genetic mutant who awakened from hibernation every thirty years and needed his victim's livers for sustenance. When Tooms attacked Scully in her apartment, Mulder co-operated with his FBI partner to handcuff the killer, who was later jailed. (TXF: "Squeeze") Soon thereafter, Mulder met a man who claimed to have an interest in his work. The man confessed that he was in a position to know a lot about the American government. (TXF: "Deep Throat") As Mulder and Scully continued their work on the X-files, the man would occasionally provide Mulder with information and the agents would eventually come to know their secretive contact as "Deep Throat". (TXF: "Deep Throat", "The Erlenmeyer Flask") Mulder and Scully subsequently investigated the disappearance of Colonel Robert Budahas and reports of UFO activity near Ellens Air Base. Mulder believed that the base was being used for the construction of airplanes, built using UFO technology. Colonel Budahas was suddenly returned but was unable to answer a simple question about flight that Mulder asked him. This led Mulder to suspect that the colonel's brain had been "rewired" by some kind of selective memory drain, but Scully argued that technology to do that had not been invented and did not exist. Despite agreeing with Scully that they should leave the area, Mulder rushed away from their motel in his car and sneaked onto the base himself. He waited until night before wandering onto a runway where he saw a huge triangular craft that hovered above him. Moments after it sped away, military vehicles surrounded Mulder, carrying men who took him into custody. They strapped him to a gurney, injected him with an unknown drug and then transported his body through a hangar building where he caught a glimpse of another triangular craft. In a medical room, doctors forced drops of unknown liquid into Mulder's eyes and injected him. Scully eventually managed to secure his release. However, Mulder seemed dazed as he uneasily walked out of the base and had no memory of what had happened to him when Scully spoke to him later. (TXF: "Deep Throat") Shortly thereafter, Mulder requested assignment to investigate the abduction of a teenager, Ruby Morris, in Sioux City, Iowa. He learned that Ruby's young brother, Kevin, had written binary sequence on several pieces of paper. The sequences were interpreted as random artifacts of historical or scientific interest and one was even a defence satellite transmission, bringing the case to the attention of the NSA. Mulder believed that Kevin had seen something or had been touched by his sister's abduction in some way and was some kind of link to her abductors, receiving the digitized data from a television screen. When Mulder returned to the Morris residence with Scully, his theory was somewhat substantiated when the agents saw sheets of paper with binary sequence on them, laid out in the shape of Ruby's face. Mulder later saved Kevin Morris from being run down by numerous motorbikes. When Kevin suggested that Ruby had returned, Mulder initially did not believe him but eventually saw that she was actually back. (TXF: "Conduit") Scully later brought news to Mulder that a homeless man's cannabalised body had been found in the New Jersey woods. Mulder believed the culprit was the mythological Jersey Devil. As Scully was busy attending events related to her personal life, Mulder investigated much of the case alone. He spent a night in a New Jersey alleyway and thought he saw a man peeking through garbage and climbing up on a roof, but he was arrested soon thereafter. A local detective accused him of misconduct and obstructing an investigation, as the FBI had no jurisdiction in the case. Mulder spent a night in jail but all charges against him were later dropped and he was released from confinement. Mulder learned that the body of a dead male had been found in the woods. He hypothesized that the Jersey Devil could be female, rather than male, and informed Scully of his theory. After the agents searched for the Jersey Devil together, Mulder had an intimate encounter with it, in which his belief that it was female was verified. However, a complaint that the agents were endangering a murder investigation was soon filed by the Atlantic City major crime unit. Mulder was saddened when the Atlantic City Police Department shot and killed the female. One week later, Scully informed Mulder that both the female and male bodies had been examined. Evidence suggested that the female had given birth, supporting a theory Mulder had that she had been protecting her offspring and had ventured into the city looking for food after the male had died. (TXF: "The Jersey Devil") Later that year, Mulder and Scully were sent to inspect two corpses that were somehow still responding to high levels of electrostatic charge and showed internal mutilation without external causality. Mulder had previously seen elements of what he and Scully witnessed in several X-files. He initially suspected that psychokinesis was responsible for the deaths, but later realized that a poltergeist protecting Lauren Kyte was actually to blame. (TXF: "Shadows") In October 1993, Mulder was reunited with former FBI partner Jerry Lamana and helped Agent Lamana with a case that was at least initially not an X-file. Together with Scully, they investigated the unexplained death of Benjamin Drake, who had been electrocuted in the Eurisko Corporation's headquarters. The building was run by a central operating system that creator Brad Wilczek had provided with a prototype artificial intelligence program. Mulder's original suspicion was that Wilczek was the killer but, after Agent Lamana also died in the Eurisko building, Mulder discovered that the operating system itself had killed the men. Although both the highly advanced computer system and a Department of Defense employee attempted to stop him, Mulder managed to insert a virus into the central operating system that caused its destruction. (TXF: "Ghost in the Machine") In a remote area of Alaska, Mulder, Scully and a team of three scientists found a form of parasitic ice worm that produced violent impulses in its host. After the group was taken to the site by a pilot named Bear, Mulder was attacked by an infected dog and later assaulted by Bear when he insisted that the pilot be tested for the infection. Mulder was confined to a room for several hours after members of the group expressed worries that he could be infected, but it was later discovered that their concerns were unjustified. Mulder believed the parasite was millions of years old and, after returning to the Alaskan mainland, intended to study the worm on a return visit. However, he was informed that the site had been deliberately destroyed by fire. (TXF: "Ice") Once he and Scully returned to Washington, D.C., Mulder was contacted by Michelle Generoo, a NASA employee who worked at the Houston Space Center. She met with the agents and asked them to investigate the possibility that a saboteur could be operating within NASA. When the agents visited Houston Space Center the next day, Mulder was honored to meet a childhood hero of his, Lieutenant Colonel Marcus Aurelius Belt, and found it hard to believe the possibility that the colonel could be the saboteur. With Belt's permission, Mulder watched a successful shuttle launch with Scully before leaving Houston. When the same shuttle's situation became troubled, Mulder returned to the Space Center with Scully. He kept her apprised of the shuttle's situation as the NASA staff tried to bring the shuttle back to Earth and was shocked when Colonel Belt later misinformed the press that the shuttle's mission had been proceeding without incident. However, Mulder still refused to believe the theory that Colonel Belt knew about the sabotage. When the agents found the colonel having a seizure in his office, Mulder saw his face momentarily morph into an alien's face. Mulder also confirmed that Colonel Belt knew about the sabotage and, by relaying instructions the colonel gave him, Mulder helped to save the shuttle and assisted in its return to Earth. After Colonel Belt fell to his death, Mulder came to the conclusion that he had been possessed by something from space and had given his own life in order to stop it. With Scully, Mulder attended a military funeral held in honor of Colonel Belt. (TXF: "Space") Later that year, Mulder intruded on a crime scene under military jurisdiction in Townsend, Wisconsin. He was searching for a downed UFO there and believed he saw the wreckage of the craft before he was caught and assaulted by a soldier. Although he was told that the site was the result of an ecological disaster, Mulder was convinced that the military was hiding a downed UFO. While imprisoned for his intrusion, Mulder met NICAP member Max Fenig, who was also confined for trespassing on the area. After Fenig was set free, Scully visited the site to release Mulder and told him that Section Chief Joseph McGrath had ordered a full inquiry into his actions with a recommendation that his FBI career should be ended and the X-files should be closed. Shortly thereafter, Mulder discovered that Max Fenig and the other members of NICAP had been following his career very closely, ever since he had become involved with the X-files. Both he and Scully later saw soldiers who had been assigned to the supposed crash site and had suffered intense radiation burns. Mulder told Scully that he had "a stack of X-files recording the same clinical results". In a warehouse at the Lake Michigan waterfront, Mulder was thrown over a stack of crates by an invisible force. He also saw Max Fenig non-responsive, suspended in a beam of light. After the light engulfed the room, Mulder was left alone in the warehouse and realized that Max had somehow apparently disappeared. By the time the hearing with Section Chief McGrath was held, Mulder was walking with the aid of crutches. He and Scully answered questions related to their recent investigation. Mulder was accused of interfering with a military operation and impeding an investigation but all charges against him were later dropped. He was told that Max Fenig's body had been found in a cargo container, two hours after it had disappeared, but Mulder doubted this and believed it was a lie. (TXF: "Fallen Angel") Mulder first encountered a group of clones after two young members of the Lichfield Experiment's Eve Series separately murdered their individual fathers at exactly the same time. He initially believed that the murders were human variations of UFO-related cattle mutilations but, after learning that he had unknowingly been poisoned by drinking a sip of diet soda that one of the clones had altered, Mulder discovered that the clones were actually the murderers. He later helped catch the identical girls, who were subsequently placed in the Whiting Institute for the Criminally Insane. (TXF: "Eve") After Phoebe Green, a former girlfriend of Mulder's acquaintance, brought an unexplained arson case to his attention, they worked together with Scully. While investigating the case, Mulder suffered from smoke inhalation but later managed to overcome his phobia of fire to rescue two boys from a burning building. (TXF: "Fire") 1994 Although Mulder was generally open to unusual and bizarre explanations, he refused to believe a claim of psychic ability by criminal Luther Lee Boggs in January 1994. Boggs claimed to have information relating to the kidnapping of two teenagers, but Mulder suspected that he was actually working with the kidnapper and was trying to save himself from the electric chair. While following one of the criminal's leads, Mulder was shot by the kidnapper, who swiftly left the area. Mulder was quickly provided with an oxygen mask and hospitalized. As he recovered from his injury, he told Scully that he believed Boggs was seeking revenge for Mulder placing him on death row about a year before. (TXF: "Beyond the Sea") While investigating the fourth death with the same symptoms as the UMW labor organizer found nearly a year ago, Mulder discovered evidence that the sect of religious isolationists known as the Kindred was somehow linked to the series of deaths. He and Scully traveled to Steveston, Massachusetts, where the Kindred lived. However, the secretive sect suddenly disappeared and the agents failed to arrest the killer, who Mulder saw morph from a female into a male. Mulder saw a crop circle left in a hayfield that the Kindred had owned and believed that they had used alien transportation to disappear. (TXF: "Gender Bender") .]] In the Maryland Marine Bank, criminal Warren James Dupre and FBI Special Agent Jack Willis were shot during an attempted armed robbery. The two men were rushed into hospital, but were pronounced dead at the same time. After 13 minutes, Willis was revived but he later went missing. Mulder believed that Dupre now inhabited Willis' body and remembered seeing that Willis had been right-handed before the incident but now mostly used his left hand, as Dupre had done. Following the murder of Thomas Phillips (the brother of Dupre's girlfriend), Mulder found a partial oblique fingerprint at the crime scene, winning favor with FBI Agent Bruskin. After Lula Phillips (Dupre's girlfriend) and Willis took Scully hostage, Mulder discovered their location and joined an FBI task force with Agent Bruskin to find Scully. However, Willis shot Lula Phillips before he himself died of complications related to diabetes. (TXF: "Lazarus") Although criminal John Barnett had apparently died in 1989 (after Mulder had been instrumental in Barnett's arrest), Mulder learned that Barnett was still alive but was unable to stop the criminal from killing his former ASAC, Reggie Purdue. By regardlessly endangering the life of a hostage, Mulder managed to finally kill Barnett and was ultimately able to save the hostage. (TXF: "Young at Heart") During Mulder's next investigation with Scully, he revealed that he believed UFOs could be accountable for Gulf War Syndrome and discovered a bug hidden in his apartment. He was misled several times by hoaxes and elaborate deceptions designed to prevent him from following an unmarked truck he believed was carrying a craft from another world and possibly its occupants. However, he and Scully were successful in tracking the vehicle as it made its way across America to the Northwest Facility in Mattawa, Washington. There, he was told by Deep Throat that the alien was deceased and was in a red-lit chamber in the center of a large room. When Mulder looked through a window into the chamber, however, he saw only an empty bed. (TXF: "E.B.E.") :Although Mulder believed that the alien was not in the chamber, as he could not see it, it may have simply been invisible like the extraterrestrial in "Fallen Angel". In Kenwood, Tennessee, Mulder and Scully investigated allegations made by local authorities that healer Samuel Hartley, the adopted son of Reverend Calvin Hartley, had committed murder during his seemingly miraculous healing practices. Although the case was at least initially not an X-file, Mulder was nevertheless eager to begin the investigation. He had previously encountered dozens of psychic healers in the X-files but, after witnessing an infestation of locusts or grasshoppers at Samuel Hartley's trial, Mulder believed the healer was using the body's electromagnetic field to both heal and kill members of his audiences. However, after it was discovered that the third victim had been poisoned to death using potassium or sodium cyanide, Mulder began to suspect that Samuel Hartley was innocent. He and Scully inspected the court room where Samuel Hartley's trial had been held and discovered that the Hartleys' assistant, Leonard Vance, was actually responsible for the deaths. Several people, including Leonard Vance, reported seeing Samuel Hartley after he died but Mulder suspected they were looking so hard for miracles that they might be making themselves see what they wanted to see. (TXF: "Miracle Man") Mulder later volunteered assignment to investigate the death of Joseph Goodensnake, a Trego Native American who had been shot by Jim Parker after cattle had repeatedly been attacked and killed on Parker's Two Medicine Ranch in Browning, Montana. When Mulder visited the ranch with Scully, Jim Parker claimed that he had thought an animal was killing his cattle and had shot at it when it had attacked his son, Lyle, but he had killed Joseph Goodensnake instead. Mulder found a large, thin piece of skin-like material outside that Scully noted was similar to a snakeskin. At Sheriff Charles Tskany's office in the Trego Indian Reservation, Mulder discovered that Joseph Goodensnake's canine cuspids had recently become abnormally large. Mulder told Scully that he believed Joseph Goodensnake had been able to physically transform into a wild animal and was similar to animal-men reported in file X 649176 and in the first X-file, initiated by J. Edgar Hoover in 1946. After Jim Parker died, Mulder and Scully found evidence that seemed to suggest he had been killed by a wild animal. Scully took Lyle Parker to a hospital, as he was suffering from exposure, while Sheriff Tskany took Mulder to visit a Native American named Ish who remarked that the FBI agent was more open to Native American belief than some Native Americans were. Ish told Mulder that an evil spirit in Algonquin lore called a manitou was capable of changing a man into a beast and could be passed down among families or if a person was attacked by one themself. Mulder learned, during a phone call to a Doctor Joseph, that traces of Jim Parker's blood type had been discovered in Lyle Parker's blood and could only have gotten there by ingestion - Lyle Parker, having been attacked by a manitou earlier, was now one himself. Mulder returned to the ranch with Sheriff Tskany and found Scully. Just as they were about to be attacked by the manitou, Sheriff Tskany shot the creature. Mulder, Scully and the sheriff then saw Lyle Parker's dead body lying on the floor. (TXF: "Shapes") In Olympic National Forest, Mulder and his FBI partner tried to determine what had happened to a team of loggers who had mysteriously disappeared. The agents learned that the team had unleashed a swarm of deadly wood mites. With Scully, Mulder was hospitalized with serious injuries as a result of being exposed to the same species of insect. (TXF: "Darkness Falls") In April 1994, Eugene Victor Tooms was released from prison against Mulder's strong advice. The FBI agent attempted to track Tooms and stop him from killing his next victim. However, Tooms framed Mulder for assault and brought charges against him, accusing him of harassment. Assistant Director Walter Skinner, who had replaced Scott Blevins as Mulder's superior, investigated the charges. Mulder later killed Tooms by grinding his body beneath a moving escalator and the case, file X 129202, was subsequently closed. Shortly thereafter, Mulder realized that the FBI intended to shut down the X-files and had a hunch that something was about to change for himself and Scully. (TXF: "Tooms") Mulder's impressive work on the agents' latest extraordinary case gained him a reputation; he and Scully were requested to investigate a case by Detective Sharon Lazard, whose brother worked for Baltimore Police Department and had told her about Mulder's work on the Tooms case. Lazard wanted Mulder and Scully to investigate the death of a Detective Rudolph Barbala, who had been thrown out of a window in a room where only he and a young girl named Michelle Bishop had been. Although no-one else had entered the room, the girl claimed that another man had been in the room with her and Detective Barbala, so Mulder worked with the girl to help create a sketch based on her description of the other man. He initially suspected that the girl had used psychokinesis to kill the victim. The sketch matched a photograph of Charlie Morris, however – a police officer who had been murdered in Chinatown, almost nine years before – and Mulder came to the conclusion that Michelle Bishop was the reincarnation of Charlie Morris. Detective Barbala had been complicit in the murder, as had former police officer Leon Felder, who was killed while Mulder worked on the case with Scully. Detective Tony Fiore was also guilty of complicity, but the agents managed to save him from being killed and, on April 18, 1994, Fiore pleaded guilty to charges stemming from his involvement in the murder. Mulder contributed the closing entry to the case, file number X-40271, in which he noted that Michelle Bishop had not been charged and claimed to have no memory of the preceding events. (TXF: "Born Again") Later that month, Mulder and Scully investigated a series of recent deaths of scientists working on realizing the theoretical Icuras Project. Mulder did not believe that UFO technology was involved, instead maintaining that something unexplained but not unexplainable was responsible. While assigned to the case, Mulder learned that someone was continuing the work of the first victim, Doctor Arthur Grable, whose head and brain were in a state of frozen preservation at the Washington Institute of Technology's Avalon Foundation. The agents also discovered that Dr. Grable shared a physical resemblance with an autistic janitor named Roland Fuller and that the two men both had been born on July 15, 1952. Mulder suspected that the two men were twin brothers and that Dr. Grable's mental state, induced by his brain's frozen condition, was enabling him to develop a psychic connection with Roland Fuller that the doctor was using to direct Roland to murder the scientists. Mulder's suspicion that the men were twins was ultimately confirmed. He and Scully were successful in stopping Roland from killing the remaining scientist assigned to the Icarus Project, Dr. Frank Nollette. Mulder's belief that psychic phenomena was involved was never proved, although Roland was moved to the confines of psychiatric custody for evaluation. (TXF: "Roland") The following month, a man jumped into a harbor in Ardis, Maryland and disappeared after having been involved in a 60-mile car chase with police who wanted him for a moving violation. Mulder and Scully investigated this incident and the subsequent unexplained death of Doctor Terrance Allen Berube, who had owned the car that the fugitive had used. In Dr. Berube's laboratory, Mulder found an erlenmeyer flask containing an unknown liquid that Scully analyzed at his request. Mulder later crept into Dr. Berube's home, where he answered a phone call from the fugitive. The man, who thought he was speaking to Dr. Berube, claimed that he was wounded after having been shot and had been in the water for the past three days that he had been missing. This was an incredible feat of survival and, by this time, the police had called off their search for the man in the belief that he couldn't have survived. Mulder was unsuccessful in his attempt to ascertain the fugitive's current location, however. A telephone number that Dr. Berube had frequently called was traced to a warehouse belonging to a company named Zeus Storage. There, Mulder saw several transparent tanks full of liquid with a body that appeared to be human in each one. Mulder noted that the bodies were alive underwater and that computers were monitoring them while they were suspended in the liquid. After exiting the warehouse, Mulder was approached by three men and soon fled the area. He hid from the men but didn't see anyone following him and walked away. Upon returning to his apartment, Mulder was contacted by Scully, who told him that the substance he had found in Dr. Berube's lab was possibly extraterrestrial in origin. He returned to the warehouse with Scully but the bodies in tanks were no longer there and the room was now empty. As they remained in the room, Mulder and Scully were confronted by Deep Throat, who provided the agents with information about the experiments. Mulder and his FBI partner learned that Dr. Berube had also been attempting to create a human/alien hybrid and that the fugitive, a Dr. William Secare, had developed inhuman strength and an ability to breath underwater due to the hybridization tests. Mulder reckoned that Dr. Berube had been killed because he was conducting human experiments with extraterrestrial viruses and that Dr. Secare's abilities had allowed him to elude capture. After Deep Throat explained that evidence of the tests was being systematically eliminated, Mulder searched for the fugitive and found him in Dr. Berube's home, only moments before Dr. Secare was shot and killed. Mulder had a negative reaction to a green substance that poured out of Dr. Secare's bullet wound and was taken hostage by the man who had shot the fugitive. He was released in exchange for an alien fetus that had been the original source of tissue used in the hybridization experiments but Deep Throat was shot to death by the assassin, moments after Mulder's release. Thirteen days after his release, Mulder was called into the FBI's headquarters and was told by AD Skinner that he and Scully would no longer be investigating the X-files and would instead be assigned to other sections of the FBI. Mulder phoned Scully the same night and relayed the news to her, vowing that he would not give up. (TXF: "The Erlenmeyer Flask") Category:Events